When Irene Nemirovsky and her husband were taken to Auschwitz in 1942, their two daughters went into hiding with a small suitcase containing their essentials and the notebook in which sheÕd written the first two books of what was intended to be her symphonic five-book masterpiece. 'Suite Francaise' remained undiscovered for over half a century, until Nemirovsky's daughter Denise Epstein resolved to make a copy of the unread notebook, suspecting it to be her mother's diary. Although Nemirovsky's subsequent murder meant the full work was never realised, the two books that do exist are masterful portraits of humanity in plight, written virtually concurrently with events as they unfolded in war-torn France.
The first book, 'Storm in June', begins with the preparations for the exodus from Paris before the German invasion. Nemirovsky's social range is broad: from the Michauds, bank clerks who join the stream of workers to leave Paris on foot in the dusty heat, to the P�ricand family, whose dignified departure is upset by the launderer leaving before pressing their embroidered linen. The second, 'Dolce', focuses on the occupation, how farmers and nobility alike (to a certain extent) had to live alongside the Germans. The villagers, repelled at first, grudgingly accept the humanity of their invaders and, in some cases, grow even more emotionally involved. Nemirovsky casts an unforgiving light on the behaviour of her fellow citizens without qualm they lie, steal and beg to their own advantage. She also sees the elemental emotions that motivate them. The individual stories that make up the whole are wonderfully thought out Рeach chapter could stand alone. The scope of the novel was certainly ambitious, aware as Nemirovsky was that she was writing towards her own death. Although the tragic story behind this lost masterpiece will continue to fascinate, there is little danger of it overshadowing the honesty and pure insight of the work itself.
